loanwords
by orpheus-under-starlight
Summary: They are all echoes of what has gone before, variations of a song sung in fragments that are halfway out of tune, a neverending cycle of love and loss and finding peace in a galaxy at war. Rey thinks destiny is a bunch of bunk. [crosspost from AO3]
1. Chapter 1

"You never leave," Rey says one day, curled high in a tree on a miserable ice planet, lost in the woods. She's accidentally ingested enough snow to match three portions—or at least it had looked that way, with how dense the stuff seemed, but when she'd taken a chunk and melted it down in a fire the other night, the residual water had hardly made it to the brim of the little cup she carries with her in her knapsack. All the while, she had felt him in the back of her mind, watching. Waiting.

 _You still need a teacher,_ he says, and doesn't bother to block the sensation of being warm and comfy in his own bed from her.

Rey grits her teeth as the wind blows right through her. It may be the height of summer here on Sholon, but she is desert-made, if not desert-born, and heat had been everything she endured up until she left. If he thinks comfort will sway her— "I said no."

 _We'll see._

She imagines punching his face in. Amusement radiates from his end.

 _You are wasted on the Jedi._

"Not a Jedi," she sighs, well used to his seeming inability to hear her when she tells him that Luke is helping her control her powers, not use them as a Jedi would. Luke had told her that as far as his limited experience had allowed him to know, he'd only ever met one man around whom the Light danced like it does around her—Obi-Wan Kenobi, a Jedi Knight, a general in the Clone Wars, and the teacher of Anakin Skywalker.

Anakin Skywalker. Luke's father. (Darth Vader—)

The legacy they all inherited. Almost just to hurt herself, she wonders again who her parents are, who they might've been, whether they left her a legacy to live up to or bear the mantle of. (She thinks, sometimes, when she is sure her thoughts are hers and there is no one around to look at her, of the voice in the vision that had said _these are your first steps_ and wonders where she has heard that voice before.)

 _What you do looks rather like Jedi training to me,_ Kylo says, a gentle note in his voice that she _does not need,_ and Rey starts ignoring him. This is the same argument: an offer, a refusal, a parry, imagined violence, and totally unlooked-for _admiration_ from _Kylo Ren._ She's tired of it. She's tired of a lot of things.

Instead, Rey scrambles down the tree as best she can—trees are not worn-out husks of battleships—and lands lightly in the fallen snow. There is nothing out here, nothing worth salvaging, only dead trees and the snowy wastelands.

She is here for—something. She isn't entirely sure what. She never is.

Luke hadn't been sure either, not really, but he'd let her go regardless. "When I was your age," he'd said, "I was running off to duel my father to save my friends. Best that you have some time to reflect before anything like that happens." He'd wiggled his cybernetic arm. That had been that. (They were both quiet for a long while afterward, terrifyingly cognizant of the past they had inherited, until Luke broke the silence by stretching and then wincing when both his knees popped.)

Kylo murmurs something she categorically refuses to hear. Rey moves, stretches, lets her blood sing alongside her staff; she calls to the Force and it answers, birdsong high and clear and free of the death that had come with the steelpeckers on Jakku. In rote repetition she finds balance, mind blissfully numb, the effects of Kylo's corrosive rage and despair muted like the songs Poe likes to play in the background on an old holorecorder she had dug up in the unused corners of the base. There is clemency in motion without urgency, an economy of movement entirely different from the desperation that had quickly killed any elegance in her a long time ago, and she finds that she likes what almost feels like a rediscovery of an ancient thing, long forgotten.

 _Soresu with a staff,_ Kylo observes, sounding almost miffed. _What will you cobble together next, scavenger?_

Rey comes to an abrupt, screeching halt; the music vanishes, the Force's high aria cutting off in the middle, Rey's staff held out in a blocking motion against an imaginary opponent's downward swing. _Don't you have anything better to be doing with your time?_

 _You want to know what Soresu is._ Smug certainty.

Rey grits her teeth. _I don't, actually._

 _Did you forget? I feel it too, you know. You can't lie to me._

To that, Rey draws on a (facsimile of a) childhood of suspicious glances and scrappy self-defense and calls him something very unpleasant in Huttese. He only laughs.

 _There is nothing you can call me that would be worse than what I am,_ he informs her, dark and rich and laced with a despair so acrid she tastes it on her tongue.

Silently, Rey figures that most of the galaxy would agree. To them, there is nothing worse than a kinslayer.

They do not know hunger. Not like she does. Not like Jakku does.

R'iia's children may leave, the Teedos had told her, but R'iia never leaves them. They carry her anger with them under their breastbones, never fading, always aching. You can tell a child of R'iia from the rest. There is a despair in their eyes that seeps up from their hearts, gnaws at them as much as the hunger does, and though they may walk, they are dead already.

A waste of resources. Sacrilege to the only truth she has ever known: efficiency is the only way to survive.

In that respect, at least, Kylo Ren would fit right in with Jakku's dead-eyed scavengers, R'iia's forsaken children.

 _Should I be offended?_ Kylo wonders, too idly. His shields lurch like a thirst-starved luggabeast, make a hop and a skip and a jump to the left, and that's when Rey realizes that he is smashingly drunk. Not only that, but an unpractised drunk, too.

Just her luck.

* * *

As she explores Sholon's forest-mountains, venturing to and from her starship in short bursts, she stumbles through a patch of brambles and draws in a sharp breath. There is a vast body of water extending out before her, stretching long and far and wide with long fingers until it reaches the horizon, and Rey, eyes drinking it in with wonder, thinks— _how did I not notice this before?_

She certainly hadn't seen it when she'd made planetfall, too busy trying to find a safe place to land. If BB-8 were here, he'd be chirping in with something about her observational skills; for now she happily forgets her inadequacies, rushing up to the edge of the water to take in the sights. Framed as it is by the snowy forests to the left and the ancient mountains to the right, she begins to understand: the mists must've been concealing this gem of a lake—can it even be called a lake? It's almost more like an ocean. An _ocean!_ Rey leans forward unconsciously, eyes wide beneath the winter goggles Poe had snuck into her survival kit—

 _Don't touch that lake!_ Kylo shouts out of the blue, startling her out of her trance; she falls backward, flat on her bum, and puts her hand to her heart. It beats far more rapidly than she thinks is truly warranted for just a bit of surprise. _That isn't water, scavenger, it's sulfuric acid. It'd burn you from the inside out if your skin made contact with it._

 _Why do you care?_ Rey shoots back. She stands and turns back into the trees, mood thoroughly spoiled.

 _Oh, did you want to suffer a horrible death? Be my guest,_ he snarls after a half-second of hesitation; she gets the distinct impression of him towering over her, crowding her in—

Rey shakes her head and hops over a gnarled tree root. _What makes my dying a horrible death different from all the other horrible deaths you've caused, Ren?_

She slams the door between them shut and refuses to contemplate the loneliness of being the only audience to her thoughts. Kylo's rage, so reluctant and incoherent these days, flares to life from far away; she turns right and clambers up an ice-covered rock, focusing on the exact route she will take to return to her ship. The benefit to Sholon's ragged, uneven landscape is that she hasn't lost any physical fitness by taking the time out of training to go on this little sabbatical.

* * *

"Tell Finn and the General that I'm quite alright," Rey tells the holo in the captain's quarters (so unlike the Falcon, she thinks wistfully, unused to the clean efficiency of pretty much every other ship in existence). "I'm stuck in the ship for today—something tells me going out in this storm isn't wise. But I'm quite alright. I feel I'm… making progress. There's a cave nearby I plan to explore when the storm lets up, and I've got a good feeling about it."

She wishes, for a moment, that they were here instead of there, that she could reach out and touch them and make sure they were real, not illusions drawn out by the desert heat. Abruptly, Rey stands; she gives the holo a smile and turns it off, then marches out to the cockpit to stare out at the viewport.

Nothing but white.

But it's not sand.

"That's right," she tells herself, trying not to shake. She hardly feels the cold in here; the ship retains heat while planetside far better than the Falcon ever did, for one, but she's spent so much time immersed in the Force here that she hasn't felt the dull edge of the discomfiting chill that had erased Jakku's heat from her bones. Usually, that sensation is as much of a constant as Jakku's sun had been. "This isn't a sandstorm. And when I find what I'm looking for, I'll go home."

She'll come back for Finn, like he did for her. Nothing and no one will take that from her.

 _Would that everything could be so simple._ Him again, and electric warmth settles in her veins, makes her head hazy and the press of gravity on her feel nonexistent.

Rey frowns a tad and returns to the captain's quarters, settling on the bed for a lack of anywhere else to sit. She wraps the flight-standard blanket around her and ignores the fact that not all of that thrumming satisfaction at being acknowledged is his. _Do you make a habit of drunkenness?_

 _Only around you, scavenger. Darling._

 _Darling,_ he's said in that _voice,_ called her his _darling,_ and his thoughts are drifting to the scar on his face. Rey's hair stands on end as the absentminded sensation of his fingers drifts from the base of her jaw to the bridge of her nose, lazily tracing the path she'd torn open with the lightsaber she hadn't known how to use. She stands almost violently, the blanket slithering to the floor, and pays no attention to his distinct pause as she rifles through her bag in short, jerky, jagged motions sharper than the steel beams scraped thin in the gutted bellies of her past.

 _You marked me,_ he informs her, clipped, academic, too drunk to know what he's saying. _In the Starlit Way, off Scalduron, that means—_

 _Shut up,_ she tells him, sharply, and doesn't let herself regret it. She doesn't want to know what his scar and her role in it means in the Starlit Way, and it has absolutely nothing to do with how the last time she was back on the base, she'd overheard some of the Resistance pilots gossiping about all her _encounters_ with Kylo Ren. Nothing. At. All. She seizes the thermal blanket and hurls it onto the thin mattress of her bed, gritting her teeth.

 _You would be marvelous,_ he's saying wistfully, something soft and bleeding at the edges peeking through the both of them for a whisper of a second, _marvelous with me, scavenger, all that anger—_

 _Are you still on about that? Let it go,_ Rey demands, flinging the other blanket back onto the bed and dropping onto the floor to engage in a furious series of core exercises. She can't go outside, can't run endlessly like Luke seems to believe is best for any Force-sensitive in training ("I'd make the Porgs do it too, if I could bear it," he'd said with a grin and an amused glint in his eyes that comes far too rarely—), and she's trapped, almost, in this box of a starship. Kriff if it doesn't drive her mad. Inaction means stillness means death is coming for you, and Rey hasn't come this far just to die.

Kylo sits up at that—she feels it, like he's right beside her, connected to her, his heartbeat matching hers; she stares at the harsh, unchanging, cold light of the ship and sees him leaning over her, eyebrows raised in disbelief that radiates with the same majesty Leia exudes in nearly every situation. Stars help her, she wants to reach out and trace the same path along his scar that he had. _Scavenger, are_ you _telling_ me _to let go of the past?_

 _You admit it's the past?_ Rey glares and does not concede. Slowly, deliberately, she does another sit-up and lets him feel the burning sensation.

He glares right back, something in his gaze yawning and ponderous and dark, as easy to get lost in as the older, floundering wreck of a Star Destroyer to the east of the ship she'd found Dosmit Raeh's helmet in, and he leans in, leans close. Close enough that all she can see is him. _You will_ never _be my past._

She recoils. There is promise in those words, words that cannot be taken back, words that he will not take back. Not even if she'd wanted him to.

But when has he ever listened to what she wanted?

 _Now and forever and always, no matter how much we hate it,_ he's saying, whispering, _we are inextricably intertwined, until one of us dies, and maybe not even then. I'm not leaving you, scavenger. How about_ you _let it go?_

It is a horrible, horrible mockery of everything that should be gratifying. If he weren't here, weren't watching, she'd almost want to cry. Instead, she forces herself to unclench her jaw and stare at him evenly. _Leave me alone_ right now, _and come back when you aren't drunk._

He leans in even further. _No,_ he murmurs, the ghost of his breath almost warming her lips.

Rey turns away from him and chips away at her exercises, something of her soul burning with her body. There is no sense in not finishing what she has started.

* * *

Thankfully, after she threatens to venture out into the raging snowstorm in her privvies if he doesn't leave, he pulls back, puts the barriers back up. If he drinks his past into oblivion again at any point in the two days it takes the storm to die down, she doesn't feel it. Rey occupies herself with feeling out the pathways she's got in mind for her trip into the cave; two are untenable, the fresh snowfall making them impassable or dangerous to navigate, but fortune—or perhaps the Force—smiles upon her, and the third is both open and relatively flat.

Enough so that a bit of work (and practice levitating things with the Force) makes for a clearing large enough to set her rather small spacecraft down nearer to her intended destination. When the job is done, she braces herself for the blast of frigid air and decides to run the rest of the way to the cave; it's roughly ten, fifteen standard minutes away, if she had to judge, and she could do with getting the blood in her veins moving. She hums as she stretches and feels a little grin overtake her when she starts on her path.

This feels good. This feels like freedom.

Eventually, she makes it to the tall spire of a mountain that houses her cave. She comes to a stop in front of the entrance, focusing on evening her breathing out, and when her chest rises and falls at a relatively normal rate, she peers into the darkness. There isn't much to see—just the outlines of rock formations, all spires like their larger brethren, rising up from the rocky earth in triumph.

"Well," she says, for a moment forgetting that BB-8 isn't with her, and freezes. The absurd feeling of being deprived hits her, and she swallows. "Oh… right."

Then she shakes herself and marches into the cave. Something tells her that there's worth in exploring this place, and Luke had suggested that she could try practicing extending her senses with the Force—something about nature, with its strong connection to the Living Force, helping her to tap into its energies. It's not the first time Rey has felt like it's all a bunch of bunk, like everything Luke has told her about the Force has a missing piece in it somewhere, but there'd been an ardent belief shining in his eyes that she hadn't had the heart to question. Luke Skywalker is a very sad, solemn man, and his hope looks like the ashes of something that never should've been extinguished.

 _Sins of our forefathers,_ Rey thinks, remembering what the Basic reading primer the Resistance gave her had said about what Force-adherents believed. Then she thinks about the reason for Luke's solemnity. _Sins of our sons._

 _Oh, we were wrong,_ whispers a cultured, conflicted voice, one she does not recognize. Rey glances to the side, then the other side. Nothing. The voice continues on, heedless of her confusion. _But perhaps he was not entirely right._

"Who are you?" Rey asks, but the darkness does not answer her.

It never has. Not really.

Still, as she forges deeper into the cave, she can't shake the feeling that there is a presence there with her—sad and solemn, given to silence, but _there._


	2. Chapter 2

When she finds the crystals, she knows why the Force was pushing her to explore the cave.

There was _nothing_ like this on Jakku.

Rey stands at the edge of the great underground pool that the lake seems to spring from, gazing out across the not-water at the crystals on the other shore, the ones that glow a soft, beautiful blue, sticking out of the ground like icicles in reverse. Like someone put them there, they stand in a semicircle; tall, silent guardians of what almost looks like a small, dusty box in the middle. She wants to make it across there, somehow, touch the box like the Force is leading her to, but she remembers what happened the last time she opened a nondescript box in the bowels of the earth.

This box looks very similar to that box.

Rey shifts, swallows, turns off the flashlight. She doesn't need it in here, with the midday light peeking in through the mouth of the river that flows away from the pool. At her feet, a tiny rock crab makes a high-pitched noise and dances away; the noise reverberates in the stillness of the cavern, but she pays it no mind.

She does still have her cables with her. There are plenty of stalactites dotting the ceiling—she could hook one up, swing herself over and back, easy. Just like scaling a Star Destroyer. And the Force _wants_ her to go to the box; she can feel it swirling around her, gently urging her to _go._

So why does she have a bad feeling about this?

"There had better be a good reason for this," Rey grumbles to herself, slinging a cable around the sturdiest-looking stalactite. Swinging across the long inlet is like breathing after a sandstorm: a familiar weightlessness, buoyant and bubbling with the relief of the clear air and the rush of a wind without biting claws on her skin.

There was something about spelunking that she had _missed,_ she realizes when she lands, and why does that make her feel—gutted, almost?

The crystals sing like the desert on a good day, drawing her out of her musings. She picks her way across the rocky ground and finds the box to be, well, very much a box; after a moment of consideration, she kneels by it and undoes the latch.

Sure enough, another lightsaber.

 _I'm not going to experience—another one of_ those _if I touch this, am I?_ Rey wonders, oddly stricken. The vision she'd seen beneath Maz's castle has stayed with her, despite herself; it comes back sometimes in her dreams, in fragmented pieces, and the only reason she hasn't spent hours mulling over it is because she has no real way of figuring out the answers. No proof. Nothing tangible.

The lightsaber at her belt jolts. Rey jumps, putting a hand on it, but it tugs itself free and flies across the lake—right into the outstretched hand of Kylo Ren, maskless and dumbfounded, like he didn't expect that to actually work.

Panic surges in her veins when he steps forward. _When did he get here, how did I not notice, why is he here, what is going on—_

The only reason she doesn't laugh when he trips over a rock crab is because Kylo Ren looks just as panicked as she does.

"Why are you here?" is the first thing out of Rey's mouth; all hesitance forgotten, she grabs the lightsaber from the box and holds it at the ready, fingers resting on the throttle-style switch.

"I—I came to apologize," Kylo says dumbly, staring at her lightsaber. There is a dark, thin strip of what looks to be a bandage covering the scar, and a fresh redness around the edges. It reopened, it looks like. A small part of her hisses in frustration. She'd wanted to see it despite herself, next time they met, wanted to see again what she had done to him. "Did you know that—"

Rey balks. She recognizes that tone—the _I have before me a piece of ancient history, let me tell you everything about it_ tone, a tone she's been subject to during singularly absurd moments like that time on Ord Mantell when they'd had to wait in that corner for the Black Sun guards to pass before they could keep fighting— "I don't care!"

And she doesn't. She doesn't want to know whatever history this lightsaber might carry with it; she's gotten more than enough of that from the lightsaber that's currently in his hands, and if she hasn't experienced another one of those visions with this one, well, that's as good a reason as any to keep it.

"It's a piece of ancient history," he says, stepping forward, and even though the entire inlet full of sulfuric acid is between them, Rey ignites the lightsaber. He stops, dark eyes bouncing between her and her weapon, seemingly transfixed by the sight. "Rey—"

"Why are you here?" she repeats, hoping that he can't see the way her hands are shaking. He's rude and a bully and a murderer and a monster, but if he's telling the truth, he tracked her Force presence down across several star systems to this uninhabited ball of untamed wilderness for no reason other than to offer an apology he _knows_ she won't accept.

 _I'm not leaving you,_ he'd said.

Had he _meant_ it?

"That," Kylo says, regret flickering across his face, eyes falling to her feet. He hooks the lightsaber she'd been using into his belt and looks terribly guilty. Of course he'd picked up on the current of her thoughts. "That, it was wrong of me, and I wasn't thinking, and I _apologize."_

Rey swallows. She extinguishes the lightsaber. The tense set of his shoulders relaxes; relief stares out at her from those eyes of his, deep and annoyingly full of knowledge, and she swallows again. _Hello,_ she thinks, looking down at the ground. _When did those cracks get there?_ "Out of everything you've done, you chose _that?_ You tracked me down by yourself to… to _apologize?"_

"I… yes."

"I don't believe it," she says breathlessly, feeling hurt well up in the depths of her soul. This is a trick, it has to be—but his mind is open to her, and she knows he's done this of his own volition, up and taken an anonymous ship out in the middle of the night; the First Order hasn't a clue that he's gone. No wonder his belt is missing from the rest of his outfit. If it had been a trap, the tracker on it would be transmitting their location to the _Finalizer_ right about now.

Kylo spreads his hands. The nerves she's been sensing from him fade. He'd expected this from her. "Take it or leave it—that is what I came here to do. But, Rey—"

Rey groans, sensing the direction he's going in. His tenacity would be admirable if it wasn't so irritating. " _No."_

"You need help," he says, condescending and earnest all at once. "Just look at the ground; if that's what you do when you're upset, it's no wonder Skywalker is so reluctant to teach you anything substantial. I could help you harness your powers."

"And _you,"_ she realizes, staring at him, staring _into_ him. "You crashed your fighter trying to avoid the lake."

"There was loose wiring in the left gyroscope. It was a _defective model."_ He nearly spits the words out at her, the tips of his ears turning red, and she wants to run her fingers over them. The thought bleeds over; Kylo's gaze turns fascinated as quickly as he'd gotten angry, and she hastily throws her mental shields up to block him from sensing any more of _that._

"Right," she says, face pink, hooking her new lightsaber to her belt and determinedly ignoring the disappointment emanating from his general direction. "Right. I'm your ticket out of here, is that it? And you figured you'd butter me up, first."

"No, I came to apologize," he insists.

"…You figured you'd butter me up, first," she repeats. "I'm the only way you can get off-planet."

Kylo remains silent, a muscle working in his jaw.

Rey holds out her hand. He isn't used to bargaining, and he's curiously unwilling to kill her. She has the high ground here. "Give me the lightsabers, Ren."

"You'll have to come across the inlet first," Kylo points out with a mutinous scowl.

* * *

They stare at each other in silence on the floor of the ship, both sitting cross-legged, both having ventured outside their cabins to check if daylight had come yet. Well— _she'd_ ventured out of her cabin. He'd kind of stumbled out of one of the shallow crew beds set into the wall in the hallway and he doesn't look too terribly eager to try and cram his tall, broad frame back into it.

"I'm not leaving until I find what I'm looking for," Rey ventures, resisting the urge to cross her arms, too. The space chill is back, and she can feel her skin prickling with it. Doesn't help that he won't stop looking at her. "It's in this area. I can feel it."

"It's at your belt," Kylo says. Almost like he can't help himself.

She glares. "I wasn't looking for another lightsaber. I already had one."

"But you still use your staff. Traditional lightsabers are uncomfortable for you," he observes, academic, then his lips curl in smug victory when hers remain pressed firmly together. "I have several historical schematics for saberstaffs in my fighter, you know. We could make one."

Trying to understand Kylo Ren is an exercise in absurdity. Rey snorts, getting to her feet. "I don't think so. I'm exploring that cave, and you're coming with me."

"You know a storm is coming?" he asks conversationally, standing with her; the hem of his dark tabard flutters with the motion. "We'll get stuck in there."

"Call it a form of meditation," Rey tells him, just the way Luke does when she's being difficult. His expression flattens.

She smiles as she palms the ship ramp open.

* * *

The trip to the cave is a quick one, mostly because she'd wanted to make sure she knew the route back to the cavern with the crystals. Kylo looms at her side like a hulking shadow, lips pursed in displeasure, and she wonders if First Order soldiers feel as downhearted at the sight as Resistance soldiers do at the very same expression on the General's face. It really is funny, how much of him is an echo of Leia Organa—it's in the eyes and the hair, the unconscious mannerisms, the commanding air.

It's just a shame that none of that grace found its way into his verbal communication.

"What?" he asks, tensing, ducking his head. Like he expects a punch. He isn't fully immersed in their connection, then.

Rey shakes her head, switching off her flashlight as they get closer to the entrance. People, she has found, aren't salvage. Dissecting him into parts wouldn't accomplish anything useful. "Nothing."

They emerge from the cave to find that a light snowfall has already begun; Kylo surveys the sky unhappily. "We need to get back to the ship."

"Mm." Rey mostly ignores him. He'd tried to start an argument a few times while they were walking, but she'd found that keeping quiet was more productive than engaging with him while he was arguing for the virtues of the Dark. A part of her isn't entirely sure where she's getting the calm required to not take the bait—it's so unlike her as to be almost Force-sent, and if he didn't like her fire she'd be suspicious about the source of it. Mostly she's just grateful that he's been quiet, comparatively speaking, though it does seem like he's steadily descending into a dark mood. In her limited experience with Kylo Ren, that doesn't tend to end well.

"Are you going to say anything?" he asks, raising a brow at her.

Rey hums, a non-response, and doesn't tell him that she had once scratched a total of thirty-six tally marks into the walls of her AT-AT before realizing that she hadn't spoken a single word in that span. Watching the way his expression contorts is almost funny, anyways.

* * *

Rey runs into her first real problem when she realizes that Kylo's presence on the ship, the echo of his internal agony in the Force, makes it nearly impossible to meditate.

And she's stuck in the ship with him. It's a good ship, but it was hardly built for space. With him in it, it feels like she barely has any room to navigate the hallways; wherever she is, he's there, face set into a neutral mask she hates almost as much as the helmet he seems to have left behind. The whole business makes trying to stretch her legs an exercise in barely-restrained frustration.

 _Meditation is one way to let go of the things that keep trying to drag you in the direction of the Dark Side,_ Luke had told her one evening after training, absently patting a nervous-looking Porg that kept glancing at its fellow sniffing the fire a little too closely. Frustration and Kylo Ren are two things that definitely attempt to do that to her. It only takes two hours of Kylo hovering before she retreats to her cabin and tries to focus.

"Can you try making your thoughts quieter?" Rey half-asks, half-commands thirty minutes later, poking her head out of her cabin and glaring at where he's stretched out against the bulkhead opposite her door. He's sitting there just to spite her—she knows it. And—damn him—it's working. The calm from before is gone, vanished into the blinding white that blocks any view outside the ship's windows.

Kylo waves his hand with a distinctly piqued scowl. Unwillingly, she catches fragments of _so light_ and _can't concentrate_ and _blast it_ from his stream of thought; she feels better knowing that he's having trouble, too, and she refuses to think about how that's not very Light of her. _A scavenger can't afford to waste time pretending to have moral compunctions. Eat or be eaten,_ she hears, and grits her teeth. "That's not how the Force works."

"Well, _do something_ about it. I'm trying to meditate."

"I could help you sharpen your focus. Make things easier for you. You're too restless to get much out of the way Skywalker wants you to meditate. We could do it together." His voice is low, intent, cajoling. His eyes, dark as ever, say _join me_. Rey refuses to allow herself to question why she flushes.

"No," she tells him. "Be quiet."

Sliding doors don't slam shut, but she hurls her pillow into the wall and gets about the same measure of satisfaction.

* * *

With Kylo around, Rey doesn't bother trying to record another holo for Finn and the General. Apology or not, lack of a desire to do mortal harm or not, he still technically classifies as her enemy; he calls to the Dark just as she does to the Light, and the Force swirls in tumult around the ship, a microcosm of a galactic clash of will and nature. Sholon is big enough that the vastness of the untamed wilderness presses in on their thoughts, dampens the intensity of the fight between the two sides of the Force, and it's getting in the way of a good and proper showdown.

That's the way he sees it, at any rate. For her part, Rey is trying very hard not to give in to her desire to start a fight herself. The lack of space claws at some animal part of her that runs solely on instinct, and that instinct keeps bleating _run or die, run or die,_ like the alarm klaxons in the Resistance base—at least, if those alarms had any voice recordings to go along with them. She's kept mostly to her cabin, darting to and from the fresher, ignoring Kylo's increasing frustration as she avoids having to look at him.

Rey groans to herself when she realizes that duty calls once again. She sheds the thermal blanket with a great deal of reluctance and stands from her meditative pose. Her knee pops as she does, drawing a wince out of her. She'd been trying to meditate for longer than she had thought, if the way her legs are protesting is any indication. Still, necessity is a compelling force; she palms the door open and is met with the sight of Kylo Ren glaring at her from his place on the floor, fingers flattening on his arm like he'd been tapping them against it.

"Rey," he _drawls—_ actually _drawls,_ the surest sign of his ire if she's ever heard it. "You could at least _pretend_ to not be afraid of me."

The way he says it is _infuriating._ Rey forgets about her bladder; she takes two, three steps forward, and she's standing over him, fists clenched, trying not to seethe and failing utterly. "I'm not afraid of you."

"Really? Could've fooled me." Kylo stands, and she's hardly a short woman, but he dwarfs her. "We've been in here for two days, now. I'm _bored."_

" _So_ sorry," she says, gritting her teeth. "Forgive me for not wanting to have a conversation with _you_ of all people."

Kylo's eyes flash at that; he tries to back her up against her door, but she gives as good as she gets, arms flashing out to catch his wrists, and they're stuck like that in the middle, just like the first time they'd fought, straining against each other—

"I let you win," he informs her. She glares, but before she can say anything, he stops pushing his weight against her. The back of his head collides with the bulkhead; Rey tumbles forward with him, pinning his arms as far up as she can realistically reach and finding herself pressed up against his chest for her troubles. Kylo looks down the line of his nose at her, something flickering in his eyes that she doesn't know how to read, and then he ruins it all by smirking. "See?"

"Allowing something in one case does _not_ make it true in the other," Rey snaps, ripping herself away from him. She stomps into the 'fresher, feeling further away from yesterday's calm than ever.

Jakku hadn't been like this. Jakku had been sun and sand and grit everywhere, but very few people. Traders and smugglers at Niima Outpost hadn't truly counted; before Finn, no one was permanent except Unkar Plutt, and the blobfish was an unctuous coward of a sentient being. Now she has Finn and the General, true, knows some other people in the Resistance on a friendly basis, but there has been nobody like whatever _this_ is with Kylo Ren, where the bond sings in the backs of both their minds and feeds off of their proximity.

Rey is not accustomed to wondering _why._ There had been no time for philosophy when she had been eking out an existence on polystarch and pieces of junk—she had to know that her family was coming back for her, that it would all be worth it in the end, or else all her sacrifices would have been for nothing at all.

But ever since Maz had told her that belonging wasn't behind her, she's found herself wondering more and more.

 _Why me? What is my place in all of this?_


	3. Chapter 3

_Rey._

 _Rey._

 _Rey, I know you're listening._

 _Rey._

 _Rey, say something._

Rey glares at the darkened ceiling. She rolls over, squeezes her eyes shut, and presses her face into the thin pillow. Even the ship's heater doesn't make it anything approaching warm at night—she's been shivering under the thermal blanket and the flight blanket for what feels like forever, even though the ship's clock had told her that it was 2100 hours when she went to bed. _I am trying to sleep._

 _Have you ever heard,_ he asks, a perfunctory courtesy, _of Obi-Wan Kenobi?_

 _Obi-Wan Kenobi?_ She has. He doesn't need to know that.

His pause is an evaluative one, the kind that holds a thousand weighted silences in a ringing moment of infinity. _He was a General in the Clone Wars. And a Jedi. That lightsaber you found—it's his._

 _I didn't need to know that,_ she whispers, swallowing. Another lightsaber with a heavy legacy. She feels cheated of the freedom of a blank slate.

 _If you don't want to use it, make a new one,_ he tells her, uncompromising. _I've got the schematics you'll want._

 _Why do you keep doing this to me?_ Rey sits up, tears pricking at the corner of her eyes.

He knocks on the door. For a brief moment, she feels the chill in his bones as if it's her own; the confirmation that he does have some more eminently practical reason for bothering her in the middle of the night fills her with untold relief. _Let me in and I'll tell you._

 _I could take it from you_. And she could. It would be _easy._ He's accustomed to her presence in his space, his guard is down, she wants to reach out and _take—_

A pause. _Go ahead,_ he invites, reclines indolently against the bulkhead. _It'll make my job that much easier._

Her temper flares; she grits her teeth, angry at herself for wanting, angry at him for… for _existing,_ really, for reaching in first and understanding what Jakku meant, for saying _don't be afraid, I feel it too,_ for holding her in the gap between a door and a buttress in the middle of a duel to the death like she was precious to him, for calling her his _darling_. Rey hurls a tendril of the Force at the door switch and doesn't care when the duraplast casing creaks ominously. Kylo pauses in the doorway, and though she can't make out his features in the darkness, she can feel enough from him to know that he's gauging the possibility of her deciding to throw things at him.

It makes her stop flat. If she'd thought reacquainting herself with the act of spelunkery was gutting, she's not sure what she's supposed to call the realization that she's been letting her anger control her.

"Difficult, isn't it," Kylo says; she looks up. He's come to stand in front of her, something in the twist of his lips suggesting either sympathy or pity, and she isn't sure which she prefers at this exact moment. "Controlling your anger. I never was good at that. Never made Skywalker too happy."

"I'm not you. I'm not trying to make him happy. I'm trying to learn," Rey says, drawing the blankets tighter around herself. He lifts his hand to his cheek, brushing hers on the way, and the stretch of skin his fingertips had passed over sparks with something she refuses to name. She draws in a quiet breath that they both hear in the stillness of her cabin.

Kylo swallows—she can hear it, the way all the scavengers learned to hear so that they wouldn't miss the first sign of trouble if it tried to sneak up behind them. He sits next to her on the bed, so close she can feel the heat of his entire body next to hers, and it's a soothing warmth. Soothing enough to make her want to curl into him and soak up everything he has to give. "You learn very well. And quickly. It's why I want to help you. You're like me; you have too much in you to ever maintain that placid kind of calm he believes in. Instead of repressing what you feel, you could harness it. Utilize it. Make it your own."

"I…" Rey breathes out a sigh. If he's being something approaching calm and mature, she can too. They're both adults, after all. She reaches out in the darkness, fingers questing through the air until they find his face; she trails her fingers down the bandage covering his scar and gets the singular pleasure of hearing his breath catch in his throat, a strangled, uncertain noise she will secretly relish for the rest of her days. When she reaches the base of his jaw, she doesn't let go. She lets her hand stay there, connected to another human being, even if he is Kylo Ren. "I remember what that felt like. I decided… that wasn't something I wanted."

His hand closes over hers, keeps it resting on his scar. "But did you really?"

"Come again?" She tries to pull her hand back. He spreads her fingers apart to splay against his jaw, the motion so gentle that it devastates something in her that had only begun to realize that he was not only a monster, but a man. A man who could have been good, once.

Or could he have? Was he doomed from birth? She has too few pieces of the story to really know, is too uncertain as to what _good_ really means, but she isn't looking for answers from the man who has just spent the better part of a day trying to convert her to the Dark Side with all the enthusiasm of a museum tour guide. (Finn had taken her to a museum with guided tours on Antares during a brief moment of rest between missions. In turn, Rey now knows more about the seven different geological stratifications of Antares' moons than she had ever dreamed of. It is a novel sensation to have a reservoir of knowledge that is completely useless to her. She isn't sure she minds it.)

"Did you really decide that, or did you decide to let the current take you where it would?" he asks, leaning into her touch, not seeming to want anything but the same comfort she only allowed herself to long for in the quietest, stillest, most dangerous nights on Jakku, when she'd lie awake in pain and hunger and desolation and stare sightlessly at her AT-AT's dark ceiling.

 _Rey, these are your first steps._

She eyes Kylo. "I chose it."

"Okay then." He huffs, an exhalation that could be laughter, and whatever else he was going to say dies in his throat when she brushes her thumb over the place she knows his veins are. Instead: " _Rey."_

Low and tangled up in a keen, agonized kind of hopelessness. He _wants._ More than just to teach.

"I can't follow you down that path," she tells him. "We're on opposite sides of a war. I want to learn what the Light Side has for me. I want to help the first friends I've ever had. I want to _live,_ not just survive. If I go with you, I can't do that."

"I'd make it right for you. Any way you wanted, I'd teach you anything you wanted," he says, the words tumbling over each other, reaching out with his other hand to grasp her shoulder—to say _anything, anything for you, I'd become whatever you wanted me to,_ and Rey almost wishes his walls would go back up so she couldn't see how desperate he is to please her and still get his way. Memories flicker past his consciousness, too quick for her to catch, too slow for her not to get the gist of them. He knows what he's doing, knows he's following the pattern he'd set for himself all the way back in his fear-filled childhood, but he doesn't know how to stop.

Doesn't know how to stop loving people enough to let them go.

Not a bad way to be, honestly, if you were anyone other than Ben Solo. Maybe that's why he calls himself by a different name, now.

Rey sighs, because she is of Jakku, and the desert endures. "Your hands are cold, you know. How cold is the hall?"

"Rey," he tries again, and when she remains as silent as the stone carvings near Tuanal, he lets out a shuddering, heartbroken sigh of his own, hand dropping away from her shoulder. Its absence leaves her skin prickling with the rush of chilly air. "Rey, I… it's cold. Very cold."

"Okay. Stay here, then." She pulls him down with her when she lies back on the bed; he goes all too willingly, lets her arrange their limbs until she's comfortable, and only when they are facing each other in silence does he hesitantly venture to wrap an arm around her waist. Rey considers his outline. After a moment, she traces a finger down the unmarked side of his face, feels the way his skin tightens when he closes his eyes. Her finger rests against the corner of his lips, then she puts her palm against his temple. "Sleep."

He acquiesces to the Force-laden suggestion with relief. Rey stares without really seeing his sleeping face for another little eternity, thoughts chasing each other in neverending circles like the too-rare breeze that used to shift the desert dunes around her AT-AT at high noon.

She will never be fully sure when she drifted off to meet him in their dreams, irrevocably intertwined with the man that should've just been her enemy, nothing more. _(Would that everything could be so simple,_ he'd said.)

* * *

In the morning, Kylo wakes up first. His gaze lands on her face almost immediately; when he sees that she's still sleeping deeply, eyes flickering behind her shut lids, mouth open the barest fraction of an inch, he relaxes and lets himself stay with her.

 _Just a little while longer,_ he tells himself. He knows it is a lie. He knows he is _living_ a lie.

He'd dreamed of her when he was a boy, young and afraid and defenseless against the terrors that came for him in the night. Once—just once—she had stepped in front of his dream-self, blazing with the light of a thousand suns, a staff that burned blue ready for action in her hands.

"Ben," she had said over her shoulder, blocking his view of the menacing man in dark robes that had been threatening him—that in every other dream had swallowed him whole. Her hair had been down. Her eyes had been kind. "Trust me."

That was all it took. Though he never saw her in his dreams again, he knew that he would meet her one day, that she would be a warrior; he wanted to be ready for her. Worthy of her and her protection. He was already halfway in love with the power she had exuded. When his parents sent him to Skywalker's academy, there was a part of him that was willing for that one reason alone.

Ben was already dying, even then, but for at least a little while, thoughts of her—who she was, where she was, how old she was—all the musings of a child who longed for connection—had sustained him.

Kylo swallows the bone-deep weariness back down into his chest where it belongs and gently disentangles himself from her, heart clenching when her brows furrow and she makes a soft, seeking noise. One thing has been made eminently clear to him throughout all his many years immersed in the Dark Side: he was never worthy of her, and he never will be. What he calls himself doesn't matter, not when it comes to her. Neither Ben Solo nor Kylo Ren could ever hope to be her equal in steadfastness or strength.

 _You wanted to teach her,_ he thinks to himself, tone acidic and scalding as he exits the room. _You actually believed, for an extended moment of lunacy, that you could do it. Excellent work, Ren. Nothing to show for it. You're_ behind _where you started. As per usual._

The viewport is still whited out, and the Force tells him little about when the snowstorm will abate. He can't destroy the ship unless he wants to strand them both, and he doesn't want to know what destiny would bring along to rescue them. Kylo bites his lip. The rage inside him demands an outlet, claws at the physical constraints of his body, the human matter it can't destroy by will alone.

Today's subject is to be himself, then.

 _Nothing permanent,_ he hears, the old reminder of the guidelines stuck in his mind. _No scars. Let the trials hone your mind, Ren, not dull it with the pain of brute strength. Remember the Dark. Remember your training. Let it guide you further in._

* * *

The Force is what nudges Rey awake from her sleep. She opens her eyes, recognizing first the loss of Kylo's warmth and second the loss of his presence; she stretches and reaches out for him in the Force, into the connection in the back of her mind that thrums with constancy.

Nothing.

Rey frowns and sits up. _Ren?_

Silence fills the space that follows after her thought. She prepares to try again, but then: _It's nothing. Go back to sleep._

"Not grotty likely," she mutters, standing. That was nothing short of ominous, the careful way in which he'd sent that thought. _Where are you?_

 _Rey, don't._

 _Where are you, Ren?_

 _Everywhere and nowhere_.

Rey blinks. _Did you bring your own alcohol supply with you?_

 _What—_ She's startled him. Good. She doesn't like how hazy he's sounding. _No! Believe it or not, I'm not an alcoholic._

 _Then why is this the same sensation—_

 _I didn't mean for you to feel this._ Panic that isn't hers lances through her veins. _Why can't I close the connection—_

 _Because I don't want it closed._ Rey yanks her boots on and marches out of her cabin. He's not in the hallway, the 'fresher, the sparse kitchen, or the cockpit; when he isn't in the entrance either, horrible suspicion settles in her gut. _You're outside, aren't you. Trying to freeze yourself to death._

Silence reigns again, this time with a distinctly guilty cast to it. Rey narrows her eyes and flicks the switch to open the loading ramp up.

She did _not_ just willingly extend her personal space to him for an entire night in order for him to go off and try to off himself.


	4. Chapter 4

She finds him in the same clearing she had been when he had made contact with her mind. He looks ridiculous—all four of his gangly limbs carefully spread out in the snow, a faint layer of frost on his clothing, hair limp with the damp, staring up at the sky with a careful blankness in his eyes—really, does he think that does anything for him? Even when she approaches, his gaze remains fixed on the sky. She edges closer and closer until she's actually standing _over_ him, one foot on either side of his waist. "Ren," she says finally, utterly lost. Oh, she _knows_ what he's doing, but the extent of it—she has to resist the urge to pry into their connection, to reach through it and into the utterly labyrinthine workings of his mind. The Force swirls around him without much intent; it's languid, uninterested in whatever it is he's trying to accomplish. "What are you doing?"

He doesn't respond, but his lips do tighten into a thin line for the briefest of moments. They're paler than usual, chapped with the cold, don't look as soft as usual—

Rey glares. "You look ridiculous."

Still nothing.

"…A nerf's hairdo would look better than yours does right now," she tries.

Kylo Ren is apparently above digs at his hair when he's on a mission.

Rey sighs and leans down, ignoring the way his slow, even breath hitches. It takes some doing, particularly as he is being completely unhelpful by bearing precisely none of his weight, but she reaches under his shoulders and hauls him up into a sitting position. The downside: she has to sit on his legs and keep her hands hooked around his back to keep him upright. She huffs. The snow is cold, more is falling around them, and she does not appreciate this. "You're being ridiculous. In fact, you _are_ ridiculous."

"I am _trying_ to _meditate,"_ he finally snaps, giving up. "You jumped to a conclusion—"

"You don't _get_ to leave," she hisses. It wasn't what she had intended to say. She had meant to point out that he had done absolutely nothing to inspire confidence in his intentions for self-preservation. But the more she turns her words over in her mind, the more it feels like the truth—the awful, awkward, embarrassing truth.

He's not allowed to leave after he'd called himself hers, after he'd kept coming for her, after he had seen and understood and had _compassion_ for her.

A thousand different emotions flicker across both his face and their bond too quickly for her to keep track. "I thought you didn't _want_ me," he says, low, challenging, pushing his hair away from his face. "I thought you said _no,_ Rey. In fact, you have constantly and consistently said _no_ , every time. Did you _mean_ no? Did you mean that?"

"I said no to _teaching._ You're more than that. Don't make it out like you're just your knowledge." She scowls at him.

Kylo leans in. "That's not how it works," he says, gripping her chin so that she'll have to look at him. Even angry, he's a magnificent sight; he's all dark lashes and darker eyes, the darkest brown, and she thinks again that she could drown in them—a thought neither of them can quite bear to acknowledge. "You can't pick and choose which parts of people you want, scavenger."

"Good thing that's not what I'm doing, then," she says, grasping his wrist. She could remove his hand if she wanted to. She doesn't. Stars know why, after he's called her _scavenger_ yet again. Maybe she'll change her name and save him the trouble— _Rey Scavenger._ Has a ring to it, really.

His laughter is barely more than a short, harsh bark. "Then what _are_ you doing?"

"Making my way in the galaxy. Staying true to my principles. Not being an accessory to genocide."

"I _never_ agreed with what Hux wanted to do," he says.

Rey looks at him. Believes him. "You let it happen."

"Do you really think it's that easy? Do you think I could've _stopped_ its construction? Stars, what has Skywalker been filling your head with?" He's breathing hard with the force of his emotion; she can feel it in their veins, feel what he was trying so hard to let out.

The calm floods her again, undeniably Force-sent, and he—senses it, stares at her like she is precious, precious water and he has been wandering in the desert for days. "He hasn't been filling my head with anything. _I_ think, Ren, that we decide our own destinies."

"That's ludicrous."

But he's shaking. It's a chink in the armor.

 _Restitution,_ the Force whispers in her ears, hums in transcendent pleasure. _A wrong righted. A debt repaid._

And Rey understands, in part, what it is that she's been looking for here in the wilderness.

* * *

"You're going back inside."

"And if I say no?" His hands are freezing. His armguards are off. He has a rather nice pair of arms, really.

"You'll be going back inside anyways."

Right on cue, a scowl appears. There's that fire. "Oh, well, if you say so."

Rey mutters something unpleasant in Huttese, half for show. She suspects he's only being bratty about it because she'd made him at least put his second tunic back on.

* * *

Rey takes one look at Kylo after he's safely ensconced inside the ship and realizes that letting him try to exert himself before he's had a day to warm up is a poor idea. He'd done everything short of enabling exposure to the weather to kill him, and even shut up in Rey's cabin with the heater cranked as warm as she dares to set it and all his layers back on, she can feel the lingering cold in him—it stays at the tips of his fingers and toes, stubborn and hard to budge. Absently she wonders if that's part of the Dark Side, part of the way his body works, or if he's just sulking.

Option three seems like a good bet. She's hanging around in the cockpit, trying to center herself. When it comes to poking holes in his worldview, she's totally fine—but whenever he decides to jab at the AT-AT or the silent days nobody else will ever get to see, all her calm evaporates. Like an ocean faced with a storm.

She sits back in the pilot's chair and sighs, something she has done far, far more since she left Jakku and started meeting some non-hostile sentients. Outside, the storm is tapering off; the trees almost look like they've got leaves again, laden with snow as they are, and she indulges herself in a fanciful moment, imagining what crystalline leaves would look like in the sunlight. It would be a sight, to be sure. Light refracts through clear crystals like nothing else, and an entire forest full of that?

It'd be nearly as entrancing as the lake.

 _Is that what you spend your time thinking about?_ Kylo interjects, sudden, still sounding ready for a fight. Hiding the lightsabers—all three of them—was an _excellent_ move on her part.

Out of pique, she shoves the image she's created at him. From a small clearing in a gleaming forest, a little path leads out to a black sand shore; a vast, endless ocean looms beyond the tree line, stretching out into the horizon, reaching for the greatness of the brilliant yellow-golden sky and a setting sun. A light breeze rustles the branches of the trees, cool but not biting; on the ground is the dust of ages and soft grass, never before trodden on. Life is in it all and through it all, the forests teem with glowing flora and fauna, sea creatures coexist in harmony deep below, and the brilliance of the light makes it all possible. This tiny world in her mind is everything Jakku was not. It is possibility, not loss and isolation.

It doesn't exist in reality, but that doesn't matter. She _chose_ to create it, _chose_ to see beauty over emptiness, _chose_ to let the Light fill it instead of Darkness. It is a legacy of what she has seen and felt and smelt and heard and perceived and understood; it is the hope she carries with her, indomitable in the face of all odds. A living hope. Not despairing.

She is no dead-eyed child of R'iia.

Kylo is silent for a long, long time, a time in which she senses his anger ebb away to be replaced by something—smaller. Tentative. And very, very fragile. _You're right,_ he says, quiet even within their bond. _It is beautiful._

* * *

"Are you going to try anything foolish today?"

"I hadn't planned on it, no." _But that could change._ A dark thought, unintended for her ears.

"Then we're going to the cave."

The barest hint of a smile. He doesn't mean it to be kind, she can tell, but something gentles its edge. Maybe it's all the snow. "What _are_ you looking for?"

"I don't know."

But Rey has a feeling she'll learn today.

* * *

In the deepest part of the cave that they dare to venture into, there is a presence so faint that it takes Rey and Kylo's combined efforts to pinpoint. It pulses in the Force when Rey steps forward, toward the center of the empty cavern lined with more of the crystals like the formation near the lake. On the ground, a long-haired, glowing man in ancient robes flashes into existence. He smiles at Rey; faint lines crinkle around his eyes with the motion, as sure as anything. The image fades, but the presence remains.

 _Hello, seekers,_ says a warm baritone voice. Kylo, standing near the entrance, stiffens. _Indeed. You too._

"Who are you?" Rey asks. This man, for a man he seems to be, is nothing like the presence that has stayed with her through the duration of her stay on Sholon. He radiates contentment. She wonders if he is a Jedi; there was a lightsaber at his hip, and Luke favors similar robes, but where Luke's signature is earmarked by serenity, this man is vibrant. He's almost like the forest she dreamed up with how joyfully the Force enshrouds him. "Are you a Jedi?"

 _What makes you think that?_ he asks, amusement plain in his tone.

"You had a lightsaber."

He's laughing now; she and Kylo both hear it, a gentle noise, a chime in the Force. _Perhaps I killed a Jedi and stole it from him._

"That doesn't seem to have gone very well for you," she says, matter-of-fact.

 _Oh? Who's to say that the Jedi killed me?_ he inquires. Rey knows at once that he must have been a teacher. She'd heard Luke use that tone when he's trying to lead her into a philosophical debate too many times to miss it.

"Are you a Sith, then?" Kylo asks, surprising her. Can't he feel the way the Light dwells in the presence?

 _I see you are a bold one. Just like your grandfather._ Kylo's expression flattens; the man sighs. _Headstrong, too. I suppose it would be hypocritical of me to count that as a weakness. Tell me, what is your name?_

Kylo remains silent. His fists clench at his sides. Rey gives him a glance, wondering if she'll have to subdue him.

 _Take it from a man who lived to be old, young one: what you say matters far less than what you demonstrate, when it comes to belief. The young lady was right—I was once a Jedi. By the standards of my day, I was not a very good one. I lived in the present moment. Where the Force guided me, I followed—it did not matter what my fellow Jedi thought to be appropriate. A maverick, I was called. In the eyes of the Jedi Council, I could do nothing right. I was too chaotic._

"Why are you telling me this?" Kylo's jaw is set and his eyes are like flint.

 _Your grandfather and I were very much the same way. The difference is that he had never known the luxury of loving without being afraid before I found him._

Rey freezes at that. The words aren't meant unkindly, she knows, but the thought is not so very unlike what she had realized about Kylo night before last. He loves so, too much; he doesn't know how not to love, can't help but give his heart up as an offering, a sacrifice at the altar of connection.

And isn't he so very much like her? Was it him who pushed, or her who pulled? Had they both wanted something, anything like the bond—the thing that ties them to each other forever, no matter what happens?

"Darth Vader? Afraid?"

Kylo sounds so _young._ So offended. So desperate to believe that he's right.

 _He was a person,_ the man says, both pitying and nostalgic at once. _And his name was Anakin._

"He came from Tatooine," Rey says softly. "Didn't he."

It's not a question. The man's attention shifts to her, a gracious motion in the Force, and Kylo's gaze burns into her hair. "He was born a slave," Kylo says, voice clipped.

"There were escaped slaves who settled on Jakku. I've heard that phrase before," Rey says.

 _Indeed. Anakin would repeat it many times on his first trip to Coruscant. If there is anything I regret about my life, it is fact that I was so focused on what he was that I never realized how badly he was coping with his circumstances. It's no wonder that he was never quite able to leave the past behind._

Rey closes her eyes, a sharp pain ripping through her heart. Maz's words echo in her ears; when, after a moment of thought, she reaches for the Force, she finds it a pointed needle, the weighted arrow of a compass finally deigning to tell her which way north is. The message is crystal clear.

Behind her, Kylo heaves in a sharp breath. "But he discarded that. He rose above it."

 _Make no mistake,_ another voice says softly, the familiar, cultured lilt that curls in her dreams like the safety of her sunlit room on D'Qar. _Anakin Skywalker was born a slave, and only in death was he ever truly free of his shackles._

"I know you," Rey says abruptly, caught up in an urgency that leaves her throat tight and her heart beating rapidly; she steps forward with her hand outstretched, not sure what she's reaching out for. "Please, wait. I know I know you. Who are you?" _Are you mine?_

"Rey—" Kylo starts.

 _You have always known me,_ the cultured voice says, gentle. _You always will. But the past is behind you, Rey. Let your concentration be on the here and now._

The man laughs. _Did it take death to make you heed my teachings, Padawan?_

 _What teachings?_ the voice asks innocently. _Rey, listen. Can you feel that in the Force?_

Rey blinks. She closes her eyes and concentrates; behind her is Kylo's Force signature, roiling with silent discontent, but further away… "What _is_ that?"

 _Excellent work. That is the sound of an avalanche two mountains over, young one. You may want to return to your ship._

"What…" Rey hesitates, a frown forming on her face. "What is an avalanche?"

But it's only Rey and Kylo, alone in the dim light of the cavern.

Kylo mutters something under his breath—something that sounds like _karking ghosts_ —and marches over to her. He seizes her wrist and begins making his way toward the exit. "I'll explain on the way," he says at the borderline hostile way her eyes narrow. "We need to get out of here."

"I can walk on my own," she says, but he ignores it.

She lets it go. The way the Force is rumbling, they have other things to worry about. Like escaping the cavern network alive.

* * *

The only thing tenser than the fifteen-minute dash back to the ship is the moment after Rey has steered them into orbit, when her hand hovers over the navicomputer and she once again realizes that she is alone on a ship with _Kylo Ren._

Who, for the moment, seems very content to sit hunched in the copilot's chair and sulk over not being allowed to pilot.

She glances at him. He doesn't look up.

 _Space it,_ she thinks. "What are you going to do next?"

"I was hoping you would have a plan," Kylo admits.


End file.
